I can’t decide if I’m thinking too much or not enough.

Once again, against my better judgement, I’ve decided to do another National Novel Writing Month. I almost didn’t, but then I did. To make matters worse, because I found I did better when I wrote by hand last year–more or less–I’ve decided to write this year’s novel by hand. This has its advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest disadvantage is that I eventually, if I wan’t to make the novel work, have to learn to read my own handwriting. This is more annoying than difficult but it’s still annoying.

There’s also the problem of word count. NaNoWriMo allows participants to use the Lorem Ipsum random text to validate novels, but that requires actually counting handwritten words. I’ve decided to use the DIY notebooks I made several years ago, mostly to clean them out and free up the space. For several days over the past months I counted the words in my morning pages and reached a rough average of words per page. One page equals about 190 words, although I’m going to count them as 185 just to be safe. This means, because each pad is 65 pages, one pad is around 12,025 words. I’ll need to use a little over four pads to finish the 50,000 words.

Most of these are gone now ,but I hope to get rid of the rest this November.

This doesn’t clean out much, now that I think about it.

The advantage of the pads is that I can write anywhere with them, including on the train and, hypothetically of course, in class while my students are working. (Not that I would ever do that. No. Of course not. Of course I wouldn’t…) I won’t have to worry about batteries dying or software crashing or start up times.

I’ve also decided to use my TWSBI Diamond 580 as my “official” pen. It’s already my workhorse pen; it holds a lot of ink; and I usually fill it with a “bulletproof” ink that dries quickly and doesn’t smear when it gets wet.

The business end of the TWSBI 580 in front of bourbon: the generator of bad ideas that seem like really good ideas

If I run out of ink, well, I can probably find a couple other pens lying around somewhere.